Eben Holden, a tale of the north country eBook

’Years ago, when I was a young man, Mr President,
I went to a dance one night at the village of Migleyville.
I got a toothache, an’ the Devil tempted me
with whiskey, an’ I tuk one glass an’ then
another an’ purty soon I began t’ thank
I was a mighty hefty sort of a character, I did, an’
I stud on a corner an’ stumped everybody t’
fight with me, an’ bime bye an accomanodatin’
kind of a chap come along, an’ that’s
all I remember O’ what happened. When I
come to, my coat tails had been tore off, I’d
lost one leg O’ my trousers, a bran new silver
watch, tew dollars in money, an a pair O’ spectacles.
When I stud up an’ tried t’ realise what
hed happened I felt jes’ like a blind rooster
with only one leg an’ no tail feathers.’

A roar of laughter followed these frank remarks of
Mr Tupper and broke into a storm of merriment when
Uncle Eb rose and said:

’Mr President, I hope you see that the misfortunes
of our friend was due t’ war, an’ not
to intemperance.’

Mr Tupper was unhorsed. For some minutes he stood
helpless or shaking with the emotion that possessed
all. Then he finished lamely and sat down.

The narrowness of the man that saw so much where there
was so little in his own experience and in the trivial
events of his own township was what I now recognise
as most valuable to the purpose of this history.
It was a narrowness that covered a multitude of people
in St Lawrence county in those days.

Jed Feary was greeted with applause and then by respectful
silence when he rose to speak. The fame of his
verse and his learning had gone far beyond the narrow
boundaries of the township in which he lived.
It was the biggest thing in the county. Many a
poor sinner who had gone out of Faraway to his long
home got his first praise in the obituary poem by
Jed Feary. These tributes were generally published
in the county paper and paid for by the relatives of
the deceased at the rate of a dollar a day for the
time spent on them, or by a few days of board and
lodging glory and consolation that was, alas! too
cheap, as one might see by a glance at his forlorn
figure. I shall never forget the courtly manner,
so strangely in contrast with the rude deportment
of other men in that place, with which he addressed
the chairman and the people. The drawling dialect
of the vicinity that flavoured his conversation fell
from him like a mantle as he spoke and the light in
his soul shone upon that little company a great light,
as I now remember, that filled me with burning thoughts
of the world and its mighty theatre of action.
The way of my life lay clear before me, as I listened,
and its days of toil and the sweet success my God
has given me, although I take it humbly and hold it
infinitely above my merit. I was to get learning
and seek some way of expressing what was in me.

It would ill become me to try to repeat the words
of this venerable seer, but he showed that intemperance
was an individual sin, while war was a national evil.
That one meant often the ruin of a race; the other
the ruin of a family; that one was as the ocean, the
other as a single drop in its waters. And he
told us of the full of empires and the millions that
had suffered the oppression of the conqueror and perished
by the sword since Agamemnon.